Topic: The Postmodern Thread

[Mandryka]

It’s Philip Glass, so, for me, there’s always a strong gag reflex.

My own feeling about Glass is what he does works well enough with Robert Wilson. The Aphex Twin piece is wonderful for the way that Bowie seems to be trapped in the Glass, as if he’s desperately trying to escape but can’t!

[steve ridgway]

It’s Philip Glass, so, for me, there’s always a strong gag reflex.

True, it has a sort of sugary trendiness about it.

[steve ridgway]

So postmodernism is what exactly? Mix and match whatever you like from the past because there's no agreement on how to move into the future?

[steve ridgway]

What do you guys make of this?

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/HZZPnYnSSR0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/HZZPnYnSSR0</a>

Is it an improvement on this?

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/PcS8yI4f93Y" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/PcS8yI4f93Y</a>

To be fair there are any number of classical masterpieces that do nothing for me so I ought to refrain from throwing stones in Glass's house . Constructing both pieces from loops as one might do with samples on a computer and drastically remixing another recording both seem post modernist ideas to me. Picking Bowie seems a bit "crossover" to me though, perhaps more of a commercial product than say Pierre Henry's remixes of Beethoven.

[Mandryka]

Maybe one aspect of postmodernism is an exploration of the influence of the past in the present. And it looks as though the key music of the past for postmodern German composers is Schumann’s. Here’s Wilhelm Killmayer’s Schumann in Endelich (1972) - which may well have been an influence on Rihm’s Fremde Szenen.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/vgFuQhgPm9Y" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/vgFuQhgPm9Y</a>

But what’s most interesting about this piece is that the relation to Schumann is not perceivable in the music, it’s there in a bit of text attached to the music which says:

At the age of 44 Schumann voluntarily entered an asylum at Endenich, participating no further with the life struggle. This child-like man had increasingly become a strange man to his fellows, who claimed to be grownup, big. This was the cause of his sufferings. For him, the piano keyboard was his entrance into a world in which he could flee and confide.

So here we have yet another case of a composer not only writing a score, but telling us the meaning of the score. I think Schumann did that too, in Davidsbundlertanze for example.

[Mahlerian]

I think that postmodernist music is more self-conscious about its relationship to tradition than modernism. An archetypical postmodern piece would be something like Berio's Sinfonia, with its layers of historical strata. It is not merely within tradition, as say, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto with its waltzes or Stravinsky's Octet with its non-functional treatment of Baroque formulae, it comments on tradition by the way it openly selects and contextualizes its materials.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/V1XSmiGO3XE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/V1XSmiGO3XE</a>

Few works so actively embody a postmodern aesthetic though. I think in general there was a trend moving away from the linguistic consistency of a Stravinsky or a Schoenberg to the variety of a Berio or Rochberg, but at the same time you can find composers like Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez who made their life projects in forging a consistent personal language. The later 20th century was, like the early 20th century, a time of great musical diversity.

[Mandryka]

I think that postmodernist music is more self-conscious about its relationship to tradition than modernism. An archetypical postmodern piece would be something like Berio's Sinfonia, with its layers of historical strata. It is not merely within tradition, as say, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto with its waltzes or Stravinsky's Octet with its non-functional treatment of Baroque formulae, it comments on tradition by the way it openly selects and contextualizes its materials.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/V1XSmiGO3XE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/V1XSmiGO3XE</a>

Few works so actively embody a postmodern aesthetic though. I think in general there was a trend moving away from the linguistic consistency of a Stravinsky or a Schoenberg to the variety of a Berio or Rochberg, but at the same time you can find composers like Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez who made their life projects in forging a consistent personal language. The later 20th century was, like the early 20th century, a time of great musical diversity.

What do you make of Bernhard Lang’s monadologie series?

[Mandryka]

I think that postmodernist music is more self-conscious about its relationship to tradition than modernism.

So maybe this is a paradigm of postmodernist music for you. Lachenmann saw himself as imbuing Mozart’s clarinet concerto with new life by presenting parts of Mozart’s music in a context wholly different from the way Karajan presented them. He even suggests that Accanto expresses a sense of sadness for the fact that Mozart’s consoling musical language is now lost on us forever, now that we have had our eyes opened to the truth by Adorno and Marx before him (Only a few benighted souls can really, authentically, enjoy Mozart à la BPO.)

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/pXihq4qZe9A" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/pXihq4qZe9A</a>

[Mahlerian]

What do you make of Bernhard Lang’s monadologie series?

Sorry I didn't respond before; I'm aware of his music, but haven't explored it.

So maybe this is a paradigm of postmodernist music for you. Lachenmann saw himself as imbuing Mozart’s clarinet concerto with new life by presenting parts of Mozart’s music in a context wholly different from the way Karajan presented them. He even suggests that Accanto expresses a sense of sadness for the fact that Mozart’s consoling musical language is now lost on us forever, now that we have had our eyes opened to the truth by Adorno and Marx before him (Only a few benighted souls can really, authentically, enjoy Mozart à la BPO.)

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/pXihq4qZe9A" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/pXihq4qZe9A</a>

Right. If Postmodern thought more generally is suspicious of claims to universality, then someone like Lachenmann who reveals the contingent nature of the received language is certainly postmodern. There's also a Piano Concerto work by Toshio Hosokawa in which the slow movement melody of the A major concerto gradually appears before receding back into the fabric. While the aesthetic isn't as radical as Lachenmann's, the idea of situating the older language in an unfamiliar context is similar.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/3SJeSgqtAN8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/3SJeSgqtAN8</a>

[Mandryka]

Here's another one. Did you ever come across Composeroftheavantgarde, who used to post here, and then changed into Jess and is now called Lilijana? She wrote a string quartet called Palimpsest which is a sort of overwriting of a Mozart piece, played here by The Jack Quartet. It's fun when the Mozart emerges kind of at the end.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1svNstsqMRMUNLhLvlyqGALuWciYWhmEU/view

[Mandryka]

Listening to Reich’s Cave Act 2 - interesting how the instruments follow the voices, like Peter Ablinger’s music. And the style of the repetition I heard in Act 1 yesterday made me think of Bernhard Lang too. It’s a real postmodern (master?)piece: avant garde ideas tamed and integrated.

[Mandryka]

John Zorn’s Forbidden Fruit is on this Kronos CD, it’s a postmodern as they come, a collage of random styles and unmodified quotations. Yet something is doing the unifying.

I was listening to Stockhausen’s Hymnen III and IV the other day. It is also a collage of styles.



I can’t help think that moment form is a major theoretical grounding of postmodern music. Of course I’m not saying that postmodern ideas were in Stockhausen’s head when he wrote Hymnen. I am saying that his theoretical work made postmodern music possible, and we can read works like Hymnen as a postmodern work today.